July 29, 2007

[A]fter 25 years of use, emoticons have started to jump off the page and into our spoken language. Even grown men on Wall Street, for example, will weave the term “QQ” (referring to an emoticon that symbolizes two eyes crying) into conversation as a sarcastic way of saying “boo hoo.”

Kristina Grish, author of “The Joy of Text: Mating, Dating and Techno-relating” (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2006), said that she grew so accustomed to making the :-P symbol (a tongue hanging out) in instant messages at work that it once accidentally popped up, in three dimensions, on a date.

“When the waiter told us the specials,” she recalled in an e-mail message, “I made that face — not on purpose of course — because they sounded really drab and uninteresting. And the guy I was out with looked at me like I was insane and said, ‘Did you just make an IM face?’ ”

Hey, what's the emoticon that means I think that's one of those fake anecdotes pop authors make up for their books? (A fakecdote.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Dave F writes:

Well, I just got back from lunch with three fellow Wall St. co-workers, "grown men" all, and in the interest of doing some of my own, original research, asked them if they have ever, in their professional lives, as "grown Wall St. men" ever heard the phrase QQ uttered to mean "boo hoo."

To which their response was they knew a good shrink that I should see.

Hopefully you'll be renditioned without due process so we'll be safe from terror.

If they don't rendition over there for illegal emoticons then we'll have to detain here. It's simple as that. It justifies the policy.

The facts are being shaped around the policy. Marx bros moment- tie onto the bed and out the window...

Look at that girl showing her cleavage(said the girl to another girl). There are some bad script plots to develop from there, which I'll get to soon as Goldberg gets these QQueers to stop sucking my dick.

Well, I just got back from lunch with three fellow Wall St. co-workers, "grown men" all, and in the interest of doing some of my own, original research, asked them if they have ever, in their professional lives, as "grown Wall St. men" ever heard the phrase QQ uttered to mean "boo hoo."

To which their response was they knew a good shrink that I should see.

Why do people keep saying Hillary is flashing her "cleavage"? There is no cleft because she's as flat as my back--or atleast, that's the impression I get from the photo.

She should get a double mastecotomy, tell people she's a survivor of breast cancer (more victimhood!), and wear some decent-sized fake boobs. She should have done that during her presidency (err, her co-presidency) to get sympathy during the Monica thing. That would have positioned her much more strongly for the 2008 run.

Why would anyone want to elect a woman with small breasts, any more than we would want to elect a politician who had a small penis? If any male pol admitted to being small there, his chances of winning an election would go into the toilet faster than a Koran at Pace University.

Fred Thompson apparently has a giant member. America deserves a leader with such confidence.

I have a ham radio license, as does my husband (who has had one since he was a kid) and two of our children.

The ham radio community uses codes that were developed for morse code communications when speaking, even if they never new morse code and don't use it.

It's not at all unusual to hear someone say, "seventy-threes" when they are signing off. Or "hi-hi" when they are speaking, to indicate that something was meant to be funny. (In morse code "hihi" sounds like laughter, "haha" doesn't.)

The use of emoticons, as much as some people frown on the idea, is a practical way to make up for the drawbacks of speaking in type. There is no tone of voice, no facial expression, and the amount of misunderstanding and anger and "flame wars" that resulted when people were figuring this stuff out were practically legendary.

So we learned to :) and to ;-) and to :-P, to :-(

(And then graphics got better and they replaced them with those ugly yellow faces... but that's another old school rant.)

But I think that our typewritten communication has changed as well. I think that we've learned to soften our "speech" in a variety of ways such as sticking in all these nice disclaimers, "I think" or "it seems to me".

If as a majority seem to feel here, the NYT was hoaxed, it’s because its EMOTIons make it susceptible to a CON.Hey “it’s fake but accurate” (fba).

The SEC has a Form 10-Q & a Form 4, but no Form 4-Q. Always wondered why.

(OK old joke. No serious response here, please about one not being able to wait for a quarter to file the info contained in a Form 4)Once when I was on line for my auto license plate in Queens I was given one which read 203 Q--. I asked the clerk if I could have the next one on her desk which read 204 Q--. She told me she'd send me to the back of the line if I kept it up.

When I was younger I wrote an opinion piece for The New Republic in which I denounced smileys (symbols like this :) ) and the people who used them in e-mail, including Scott Fahlman, who invented them.

My smileys piece is an object lesson in why the Internet is sometimes a bad thing. The problem with the Internet is that nothing fades away there. And so a silly little opinion piece like this one lives on forever. In an earlier era, it would have ended up moldering away in a few libraries where no one would ever see it.

For the record, I no longer agree with my own smileys editorial of 1993, for two general reasons:

1. I wrote it in a snotty tone that I wouldn’t use if I were writing it today.

2. It reflects a mentality about writing that I clung to early in my career but have since rejected. According to this mentality, the way to write well is to produce a bad first draft and then toil through many revisions, editing it and refining it to bring it ever closer to some supposed Platonic ideal. If you believe in this (as I used to) and if you apply it to the topic of smileys, you arrive at the conclusion that smiley users are lazy writers who could get along just fine without smileys if only they took the trouble to revise and edit their work a little bit, to make the meaning clearer. Of course, as Fahlman himself points out in his web page about smileys, this is not the way people actually write. Since I wrote my denunciation of smileys, I have become more interested in the way that people (including myself) actually do write, and have stopped worrying so much about how they ought to write. So, when I re-examine what Fahlman and I have written about smileys, I end up agreeing with Fahlman, and thinking that this Stephenson kid must be living in some kind of fantasy world.